“the biggest, fastest-growing expenses tend to be the ones Americans object most to cutting.”

“Fastest-growing” I’ll grant, in the sense that those items all have to do with health care programs—and not Social Security, which Lowrey lumps in with them. But restraining long-term growth in those will require not some sort of Nietzschean will to cruelty, as Very Serious People believe, but conceptually difficult policy changes, carefully crafted and iteratively tested. Moreover we should, frankly, get used to the inevitable growth of health care as a proportion of private and public budgets, given that health care is labor intensive; and journalists ought to help with our getting used to it.

In the meantime, since all that growth won’t happen right away, there’s an item that represents a huge part of the federal budget and that a very comfortable majority is happy to cut (.pdf)—according to Lowrey’s own chart. But she doesn’t mention cutting it as a proper goal of budget negotiations. In this she perfectly reflects the VSP consensus that allowing spending on it to decline substantially would be, you know, Inappropriate. Any guesses what it is? (Answer after the jump.)